BeagleBox

It isn't clearly obvious how to do this. Some googling turned up the following, none of which seemed to work generically when logged in as root and running "date":
1. add TZ env var to /etc/inittab
2. add TZ env var to /etc/init.d/rcS
3. use /etc/TZ and point TZ to it
4. use /etc/localtime and point TZ to it
How you set TZ depends on whether you're using uClibc or glibc. I'm using glibc so using /etc/TZ or /etc/localtime seems reasonable. What is confusing is that glibc expects the whole /usr/share/zoneinfo directory hierarchy but that wasn't build with glibc for some reason. I'm not sure why. Possibly because cross compiling using host and target with different endianness doesn't work with locales, or something like that.

Variations on these were also tried. In the end, what worked seemed to be setting TZ=`cat /etc/TZ` in /etc/profile (the default profile for ash) and creating /etc/TZ with "echo MST7MDT > /etc/TZ". So now all that's needed is to manually set /etc/TZ and logging in will pick up the timezone.

Other tools will have to do similar things, such as rcS or maybe each inividual init script. I haven't tried referencing /etc/TZ in the X.org init script, for example. Nor have I found a way to set TZ globally. I can't do it on the Linux command line (I don't think) or via init and even if I could I couldn't dynamically change it. So setting it in /etc/TZ and manually referencing as needed seems the best option.

Added /etc/profile and /etc/TZ, the former referencing the latter. Also updated S90UI to reference /etc/TZ.

This issue can be closed.